Donald Trump is he who must not be named in corporate America.
A new study from Morning Consult elucidates the silence. More and more companies see no benefit to discussing Trump in either a positive or a negative light. While 30 percent of people will have a more favorable view of a company if they praise the president, the study found, another 32 percent of people will only have a more favorable view if they bash the president.
It is a damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don’t situation which ends with smashed Keurig machines and spilled Starbucks coffee. For instance, 56 percent of Trump voters will have a much less favorable view of a brand if they say something derogatory about the commander-in-chief.
And so more and more companies, Axios reports, are biting their tongues when it comes to Trump. Good.
[Related: Starbucks CEO: Trump talk partially to blame for racial divide in America]
Corporations exist to do one thing. Namely, enrich their shareholders by selling products to consumers at the highest possible price point. Toward that end they build faster cars, better computers, and smaller microchips. They make our lives better and we give them our money. This exchange of goods and services is the one and only purpose of the corporation. Anything else is pretense.
This is a cynical view, yes, but it is an honest one because there is a surplus of opinions about the president already. The electorate can make up their own mind without Amazon or Facebook or Twitter pontificating about the current state of politics.
What corporations are just figuring out, consumers understood a long time ago. Whether it is a pledge drive for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital or a statement on the president’s immigration policies, corporations’ public relations are efforts to endear themselves to consumers. This doesn’t mean that the employees of a corporation don’t have strongly held opinions and convictions themselves. This means that the corporation has strongly held opinions about profits alone.
So praise Apple, for instance, when they donate a whopping $160 million to HIV and AIDS research through their Buy (Red) initiative. But feel free to roll your eyes when Apple CEO Tim Cook makes an unsolicited, moralistic announcement about whatever Trump issue is in the news.
We are all better off though when the business of American corporations is business. We are all better off when they concern themselves with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering all over the world, not when they dabble in politics.
